Telephones typically represent one of the primary ways an individual can communicate with another person or an organization such as a business or governmental agency. Typically, a user must dial a telephone number to establish a connection with another telephone associated with that telephone number. Answering machines and voice mail systems provide a well-established way for a user to leave a message for another user if the calling user is unable to reach another user. A user may attempt to call another and, if the recipient is unable or unwilling to answer their phone, a voice mail system may provide the calling user with the opportunity to leave a voice mail message for the recipient. The recipient may, at a later time, review their voice mail messages and may return missed phone calls based on the recorded messages.
Often, a person leaving a voice mail message will leave their phone number in the message so that the recipient will know how to reach them to return their call. In these cases, the person may leave a verbal message that says something to the effect of “call me back at 512-555-1212”, where 512-555-1212 is the phone number the person used to call. In many other cases, the person leaving the message will leave alternate and/or multiple phone numbers if a single phone number will not suffice. The caller may leave a message, for example, that says “call me back at 512-555-1212 before 5 pm, but I'm out next week, so call Steve at 512-555-1234 next week”. Users have great flexibility in what kind of information they leave in a voice mail message, resulting in a myriad of possibilities for the content and form of voice mail messages.
The recipient who is listening to voice mail message will often want to record phone numbers left in a message, particularly if the caller is someone for which the recipient does not yet have contact information. When the recipient listens to the voice mail message, they often have to scramble to get a pen to write down the phone numbers or open up a text editor to make a note of the phone numbers left in the voice mail message so that they can return a call. These solutions can be unsatisfactory when the recipient does not have a pen handy, has to re-listen to the message after missing some of the numbers, or is not ready to start manually recording the numbers. These solutions can also be unsatisfactory when the speaker is hard to understand, such as the caller talks fast, slurs, or is not speaking in their native language. These problems can be exacerbated if the recipient is otherwise distracted, such as if they are checking their voice mail messages from a mobile phone while they are driving. For a recipient who is checking messages while driving, having to manually write down phone numbers in a message can be very inconvenient and even dangerous. There is, therefore, a need for an effective and efficient solution for extracting phone numbers from voice mail messages.